[en]

There is a growing awareness of the need to go online. Most business owners today understand that you have to be online to even exist. The question that most of these business owners have is: Is it really for me? Or as an extension, if I go online, will I be able to sell? Is people really looking for my product online?

We tend to confuse online marketing with creating websites. And even though creating a website is an important decision and can be a powerful tool for your product’s marketing, it is hardly the only way to market online. The internet has more than websites, it is used for email, for social communication, for information and for entertainment.

A lot of times, small businesses don’t even need to have a full blown website, what they really need is a blending of their regular sales activities with the tools that internet offers.

Not having an online presence is the worst mistake ever. Hiding in your office pretending that you don’t need a presence online because of fear of exposure is not a smart move. Some businesses don’t need to do much marketing as the sales are owner driven, meaning the owner connects with possible clients as part of another activity or similar situations. These are obviously situations where the business is so small that it is only a one man shop. For larger businesses, utilizing the internet as part of the marketing strategies helps boost the sales process.

So, here the five signals that you need an online marketing strategy:

1. You have a sales funnel that needs to be constantly fed.
2. You depend on new clients as well as old ones and need to nurture relations to generate up-selling and cross-selling.
3. Your business deserves to be bigger and meaner.
4. You have ever heard a customer ask, how can I find you online? When trying to find your address or information about your products.
5. Your competition is online and crushing it. Or they are not there and you can take the lead being the first.

There are many reasons why a business can and should go online. What matters is that considering what online strategy can be applied to facilitate your business is always a great strategy. One more thing, with a proper internet marketing strategy, your customer service experience may be enhanced and provide a greater product experience to your customers, thus generating more sales and positive word of mouth effects.

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

We are in the best season for the retail industry… the holidays. Most retailers have been working hard on preparing for this season, but some, lagged and are still trying to catch up. What can you do if you are in dire need for a fast strategy to promote your products or services for this holiday season?

Two options

Option 1: Go the traditional way and start getting ads out in radio and TV and hope for the best. This works every time if you have the necessary budget and a good product, specially to compete with the other advertisers’ air time budgets and products.

Option 2: Go web. Just in case you thought I wasn’t going to mention online strategies, here is strategy number 1 for fast results in a tight schedule. Online paid advertisement works wonders for cash strapped companies who need a campaign on the go. Not all products have the advantage of getting good results when promoted this way, so it is important to talk to someone with experience and who knows before you go wasting your ad budget. A nicely distributed ad budget can work wonders, specially considering the many outlets currently available.

Depending on your product, you can take advantage of Facebook advertisement or Google adwords. Likewise with Youtube advertising or Yahoo/Bing advertisement. All this different platforms have advantages and disadvantages depending on the product or service.

The second component of this kind of campaigns is the Landing Page strategy. It is very important to consider demographics and psychographics before creating a pretty webpage design for each product. Think about the product and the end client and create content and design focusing on the thought process of the customers, otherwise, you can easily get traffic, but still not make a sale.

In any case, do your research properly before launching in an adventure like this. A well done campaign can generate a ridiculous amount of money and success. A poorly planned strategy can leave you asking… wha’ happen?

Ma Cualli Ohtl!

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

Verizon has launched an aggresive baiting campaign and its breaking the iPhone’s marketing to give Android’s spot in the world of smartphones (and very soon, superphones).

Verizon’s new ad not only spoofs and mocks iPhone’s advertising style, but completely trashes iPhone’s known issues and annoying quirks.

I know most people feel compelled to justify the expensive iPhone purchase and pretend the iPhone has no faults, but just as Verizon’s ad points out, it does have many of them.

The add completely breaks iPhone advertisement by smashing the “pretty” factor associated with iPhone and contrasting it against Android’s might and power. The message is pretty clear… that and that Verizon is not getting iPhone service.

I wrote an article talking about what “real marketing does” and showing a dissection of Steve Jobs’ state address and the usage of keywords tied to specific products. This is another kind of “real marketing”, were Verizon takes a highly beloved and publicized concept and turns it completely in its head. That’s pretty much taking the bull by the horns. Will this strategy ultimately work? Will the “Droid Does” campaign put a dent in Apple’s impressive marketing machinery? We’ll see, may the best marketing team win.

Food for thought:

1. Droid makes clear reference to Android (Google’s cellphone OS based on Linux)

2. The website is similar to the TV commercial, but adds an interesting couple of lines: “Don’t you wish you had a robot sidekick that moved at light speed, could get you out of any problem and lived in your pocket?”

3. For fast readers, did you notice that at the bottom of the commercial a line stated: “Droid is a registered trademark of Lucasfilm Ltd., licensed to Verizon.”?

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

The Web Surfer’s Guide to the Free Internet

Here be the first edition of the Web Surfer’s Guide.

Before the free parade, please read the following pointers about downloading free stuff online:

1. Be careful what you get. Most free stuff comes with a risk. This may mean its bad stuff (as in bad free music or movies) or that the product is not final (as in alpha and beta software releases full of bugs).

2. Stay as far as you can from Warez and Piracy sites. Even though you may be attracted to the lure of free (illegal) stuff, the risks are extremely high if you don’t know what you are doing.

3. If so inclined, donate, comment, provide feedback, report bugs, help with code, give ideas, promote the product. This will help those who give you for free and will give people a reason to keep supplying free stuff.

Now the good stuff. The free sources links (some here for now, more coming in future revisions of the guide):

Here be “Freeness”

www.frostclick.com/ – Free Music, free movies, free software… free all and very, very legal. How cool is that?

www.frostwire.com/- Free download software – Torrents and Peer to peer (like Limewire)

www.ubuntu.com – Free OS with a huge fanbase and support forum. Almost all issues can be solved there or you can post yours and get help. Try it with the software below.

www.virtualbox.org/ – This is like a computer within your computer. Allows you to safely test other OS without having to do a full hard disk install.

www.drupal.org/ – To build websites you can use this free content management system (CMS). Its all the rage with programmers. Not so user friendly though.

www.joomla.org/ – Same as Drupal, but easier for less skilled programmers. Excellent system for regular users without much programming skills (even without programming skills at all)

www.wordpress.org – A highly popular CMS for blogs. Use it in their site (www.wordpress.com) or install it in your server for more options, scalability and benefits for your site.

www.sourceforge.net/ – Open Source home. Programmers and developers post their newest work here and let you download it free. Search for a tool you’ve dreamed of, chances are, you may find it there.

www.iconpot.com/ – Free Icons for personal, commercial use without having to provide credit everywhere.

www.1001freefonts.com/ – Most of these fonts you can download and use in personal projects, some require permission or to be purchased for online use.

www.net-matrix.com/ – More free software. A huge collection of free software.

www.hulu.com – Free TV shows and some movies. Only available in the US.

www.archive.org – A very interesting initiative to create an archive of all human. There are free movies, cartoons, antique acetate records (music), home videos (yes, home videos). Want to see how a website started? You will find all its changes here too.

www.legaltorrents.com/ – Free legal torrents. Movies, music, animations, images, etc.

www.wikipedia.org – The world’s largest free encyclopedia. Ok, everybody knows it, I just felt I had to mention it.

www.translate.google.com/ – Free Google translator for almos any language. Very good, not as a real translator, but does the job for non important things.

http://code.google.com/p/live-android/downloads/list – Coming soon to a smartphone near you. Android is ready to take on the market if you have some basic skills in programming, this is an interesting way of testing sites in Android without having to get your own smartphone with ‘Droid.

This is a very, very short list of the wonders hidden on the web. I have a much larger collection of free legal stuff sites, but for the time being, this is the first edition… I will come back and work on this guide some more. If you ask for a source of free stuff for a particular subject, chances are, I’ve got it. Post in the comments what you would like to find out and I will add it to the guide on the next revision.

Ma Cualli Ohtli!

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

They say that the measure of your importance is in how many people copy you. Online, this may or may not be true.

I woke up this morning to find that I had a pingback to this blog. I thought, “Yey! I’m becoming someone as I get quoted”, but it turned out to be just a witless blogger who had copied a post I did in Article Base (see it here, note the date of Sept. 15) and had not bothered to remove any of the links I had in that article (this is fortunate as otherwise it might have taken some time before I found out). This person copied my article word by word in its entirety, which is part of the Article Base attributes, but he/she didn’t even gave credit (which is a requirement from Article Base).

I’m at a crossroad here. I feel annoyed because this person didn’t give credit to the article’s rightful author (me), worse still, the post has some links to my blog and site and all have a “nofollow” attribute (meaning they don’t count for Search Engine Optimization either).

The worst is I think this person has been stealing posts all over the place, most of his posts have duplicates or rather, are duplicates from other websites with absolutely no credit to its rightful owners. It is sad to see a such a cheap blogger.

I have asked this person to remove the post or give due credit and links. Doubt this will be the end of it though…

Will let you (my 3 or 4 readers) know more as news develop.

Ma Cualli Ohtli!

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

Online advertising spending has a downward trend and some believe it will continue

As internet users evolve, they stop clicking at the first thing that moves. I remember when the internet was this strange new thing (circa 1993) and most of the time I was just trying to find what to click. That certainly changed over time. The internet has become an every day tool for most of us. The internet has permeated the way we do business, make purchase decisions, share information, keep in touch and work.

Most kids now can’t even conceive a time when there was no internet. It’s not uncommon to hear, “Dad, what did you do before to find this or that when there was no internet?” or “Really? There was no Google?”. As users (and consumers) grow online and evolve, the internet changes with them. Along with users and the web, marketing has to constantly evolve and adapt.

On my previous post, I talked about brand awareness and how some businesses benefit from this effect online. Browsing today, I found two articles about how clicks on display ads* are dropping. This has happened before, and is repeating as the most recent wave of new online users is learning and avoiding unwanted ads. Internet makes users active evaluators of the information offered and rarely are we searching for a new ad, unless you work for marketing and want to check out the competition.

I have been telling my clients that more than the stats (Click Through Ratio’s, Clicks) that most online marketers focus on, we should look at exposure, brand awareness and what Dean Donaldson calls “Dwell”. What is Dwell? I’m not sure, but I can consider it as the effect of the user hovering around your ads, not necessarily clicking, but being marginally aware of the information contained in it, and by this effect, actually generating a print in their minds which can be considered a form of brand awareness. Hence, the term Dwell will fit right into this phenomenon.

If your online expert, internet marketer or even, web designer, talks only about clicks, their missing on the effect of a well managed brand presence as brand awareness. It does matter how you position your brand, the most innocuous and simple advertisement online can mean bad associations (eg. a flicking banner annoying the user, an ad popping up and bugging the prospect) and an unconscious negative perception of what your product or service is. This would make your prospect, of course, less likely to buy from you.

Some numbers from ComScore and Starcom “Natural Born Clickers” study:

• Click on display ads has dropped 50% in the last two years;
• Consumers exposed to display ads are 65% more likely to visit the advertisers site than those that had never seen an ad;
• Half of all clicks on display ads come from lower income young adults.

In summary, heavy paid ad clickers are young, male and with low income… hardly what most companies envision as their target audience.

Ma Cualli Ohtli!

*Display ads are usually ads inserted in webpages with images, text or a combination of both.

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

Wow! I love Apple! Its always a marketing inspiration, no matter where I am and what I’m doing. Most people like the brand, heck, even love it. Some poeple are extreme fanatics and go out and constantly promote it. That kind of brand loyalty, WOM (Word Of Mouth) and supermarketing effect makes Apple a sure marketing example to quote. This edit of Apple’s Keynote address in September 2009 is a way of dissecting the event. Notice how the keywords are related to each product and subject.

If you want to see the whole presentation, click here. Additional sweet spots to note, Steve Jobs is an excellent storyteller, the first thing he does upon entering the stage… he tells a story. A deep, emotional, quasi personal story that everyone can relate to. But not only that, he also associates other key concepts to Apple in the process. One being “generous”, as in, Apple’s customers should be generous (he uses “we”) when buying an Apple product (boy they are pricey!).

Steve Jobs and his marketing team are the real geniuses. Granted, Apple does have some great features, but the “cool, amazing” factor is what really brings the brand to where it is. Steve Jobs did it in his first tenure at Apple, and Apple was successful. He was fired, Apple went through a hard spot as there was no good marketing behind it, then Steve Jobs was begged to return, and the marketing party started again! Hats off to the smart marketing used in Apple.

Two lessons:

• Always associate extremely powerful and postive concepts to your brand.
• Learn how to tell deep, emotional stories to win your audience.

Leave your comments and questions below. I’ll answer as soon as possible or if necessary, create an article around your question.

Ma Cualli Ohtli

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

Now, that is a good question. To judge by the language and styles we internet marketers use online, in our blogs and sites, I would certainly say yes. Just like rockstars, we have our trends and styles.

A little boat went sailing and was full of web marketing guys who talked and talked and then they happily blogged!

Many online bloggers and internet marketing gurus fashion baldness and have funny pictures of them showing off doing sports or even being acclaimed by hundreds in a presentation.  I’m debating between posting a picture of me doing something daring or funny… what do you think?

I was recently invited to a particular internet marketers’ event. Just picture this: a cruise ship full of web marketing “gurus” talking about web marketing. Considering that internet marketing is just into its boom, I think that’s pretty fast. Well, we are a wild bunch, ain’t we?

There are marketers who now market to other marketers. We collaborate, help each other, share a lot of our knowledge and get together to do a bit more of giving away! Traditional printing companies have had to evolve to web design and the usage of digital media. Traditional marketing companies have been studying web marketing techniques, learning from them and applying them in traditional marketing strategies (if not moving a lot of their marketing efforts online!). Traditional web designers are slowly, but surely getting into this internet marketing hype, but still hold dearly to their pretty designs. Even grandmothers are getting on the wagon… to me it all sounds a bit too wild west. Rather exciting, although you have to be careful.

There are many who promise success online with minimal efforts, much like the magic tonic sellers of old, they promise something which is mathematically and physically impossible, as it is not possible to make everybody rich. There are many online marketers out there that promise outstanding results and even put it as a guarantee. Of course, I don’t think we have to say “buyer beware”. Most people are pretty smart shoppers nowadays. Are you a smart shopper?

Ma Cualli Ohtli!

Internet has given us power, knowledge and choice… go use it and use it wisely!

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

Granted, internet marketing is all over the place these days. To hear all internet “gurus”, internet marketing is the non-plus-ultra of the marketing world. Not to swim against the current, your friendly neighbourhood marketing guy, a.k.a. me, has decided to make a list of the 10 top reasons why the web is hot and will continue to be hot for a while longer (some even predict that it will not stop for a very long time).

• Reason #1. Every effort has a way to be measured. Long gone are the days of “I don´t know what half of my budget is wasted”. All traffic can be measured, tracked and analyzed. Get on with it!



Image via Wikipedia

• Reason #2. Highly Targeted. Don’t want to spend money targeting everybody? Want to focus only in people who are interested in your service? Smile! Internet marketing is here.
• Reason #3. Its open 24 hours and works for minimum wage. No, its not your corner convenience super store or your grocery giant, sure, not even the big yellow “M” we all love, its internet marketing and it will never complain for working overtime.
• Reason #4. David does beat Goliath. Even though I read the other day that David did not defeat Goliath (honest! If you don´t believe me, read Myth #4 in this 5 anythings blog), the metaphor applies. The small can look as big as they want and beat giants who are still slow to move online. You do it right, you can become the little engine that could and be giant online before your competition!

• Reason #5. Power to the people! The internet has changed how we do business, whether we like it or not. People have choice and control, and are now able to demand better services, better customer care, better prices simply because if they don´t like your service, you may find a bad review floating on the web and scaring away potential customers (better be nice!).
• Reason #6. It´s cheap. Well, maybe not that cheap, but definitively compare it to any other marketing method and you´ll see what I mean. One barely useful ad on the yellowpages… thousands of dollars a year. One 10 seconds TV ad at 2 in the morning… several thousands of dollars. One guy sitting in a basement while typing stuff in a laptop to promote your business… well, not priceless, but very well priced! (and no, I´m not in a basement, I live on the 10th floor!).
• Reason #7. Two can talk, one million… These days, the internet is all about the so called “social media”. Social media is about creating conversations with your customers. You can find out where your business is going wrong and correct it or learn about new possible ways of increasing your revenue or diversifying your business or about new opportunities for your company… you get the idea.
• Reason #8. Are you there every time? Repeated exposure improves the chances of a sale. Same reason why TV ads are played over and over, the client needs your service, when the client needs it, it is a good idea to be there when the client is looking.
• Reason #9. Get real close… With internet marketing, you have a greater chance of building a relationship with your client. Through social media you can develop a close relationship, make your company more personal and familiar to your clients, so that when they are ready to buy, they  buy because they trust you and just because you are cheap!
• Reason #10. No cheating! Being a trusted name for your clients also means repeat business as they get used to your product or service and become loyal. Of course, you have to take good care of them, pay attention to them and nurture the relationship and you will ensure loyal clients that will not cheat on you.

Phew! Made it through, had many more ideas, but I think these are pretty good and important. Internet marketing is very important now, but it will be even more important in the future, as more businesses go online. Many companies are actually finding new ways to save on real estate, payroll and paper by moving online. If you are ready to move online, give me a shout or leave a question below and I will be glad to answer them as they come.

Ma Cualli Ohtli!

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.